First, the G7 fell apart. The gathering of the West’s seven major industrial powers collapsed on the issue it was originally set up to address: a reliable world trade order, based on agreed rules. The West is no longer united by common values; it is divided by economic interests. Donald Trump was only being consistent when he called for Russia to be re-invited to the group.

A second event took place at the same time as the G7. No coincidence: at the meeting of the Shanghai Group, the West’s authoritarian rivals showed a common will and a common desire to shape the globe’s post-Western architecture. These days, China, Russia and the other Shanghai Group members represent 40 percent of the world’s population and 20 percent of world trade. Little unites this disparate group of nations except a belief that this century will be post-Western.

The third event was the Singapore summit between the North Korean dictator and Donald Trump, a democratically elected president. This proved, yet again, that we are facing a new era of nuclear proliferation. The Non-Proliferation Treaty has burst apart. Iran’s leaders will have watched the Singapore meeting with a watchful eye. They may well conclude that it was a mistake to get mixed up with a deal to abandon their nuclear weapons. In the end, those nice Europeans could provide no security.

Clearly, only those with nuclear weapons will be taken seriously in this world, and invited to sit at the negotiating table. The end of “regime change” is what Donald Trump offered to Kim Jong Un, but not to President Rouhani of Iran, who gave up his nuclear ambitions. The world’s dictators will learn a lesson from this — get hold of nuclear weapons if you can. On the Korean peninsula, even the mighty America was forced to give up its ideas of regime change.

“Europe: Whatever it takes.” This should be Germany’s motto... No one has profited more from Europe; we are the continent’s political, economic and financial winners. And no one stands to lose as much as we do. Our neighbors once invited us to join them in founding the European Union, even though just a few years earlier we had brought murder and pillage to their countries.

That step was taken by courageous statesmen from France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. They had to face down plenty of skeptics and critics in their own countries. But those politicians knew that Europe really was a question of life or death.